The Public Record
Booker Taliaferro Washington was an American educator, author, and orator. Between 1890 and 1915, Washington was the primary leader in the African-American community and of the contemporary Black elite.
One might have removed from Hampton all the buildings, class-rooms, teachers, and industries, and given the men and women there the opportunity of coming into daily contact with General Armstrong, and that alone would have been a liberal…
The older I grow, the more I am convinced that there is no education which one can get from books and costly apparatus that is equal to that which can be gotten from contact with great men and women.
I learned there for the first time some of its value, not only in keeping the body healthy, but in inspiring self-respect and promoting virtue.
I was determined from the first to make my work as janitor so valuable that my services would be indispensable.
Nearly all had had enough actual contact with the world to teach them the need of education.
The great and prevailing idea that seemed to take possession of every one was to prepare himself to lift up the people at his home.
At night, and between meals, I found considerable time for study and reading; and in this direction I improved myself very much during the summer.
I felt that this was a debt of honour, and that I could hardly bring myself to the point of even trying to enter school again till it was paid.
I have begun everything with the idea that I could succeed, and I never had much patience with the multitudes of people who are always ready to explain why one cannot succeed.
Before this I had never cared a great deal about it, but now I learned to love to read the Bible, not only for the spiritual help which it gives, but on account of it as literature.
At Hampton I not only learned that it was not a disgrace to labour, but learned to love labour, not alone for its financial value, but for labour’s own sake and for the independence and self-reliance which the ability to do something which…
The idea, however, was too prevalent that, as soon as one secured a little education, in some unexplainable way he would be free from most of the hardships of the world, and, at any rate, could live without manual labour.